The Roma-Lido commuter rail line departs from Porta San Paolo station - directly connected to the Piramide metro stop on Line B, two stops from the Colosseo - and reaches Ostia Antica station in 25 minutes. Trains run every 15 minutes throughout the day; the fare is covered by a standard Rome metro ticket (€1.50). From the station, the archaeological park entrance is a five-minute flat walk across the Tiber pedestrian bridge.
The Rome Marathon runs on the last Sunday of March. Ostia Antica in late March is in its spring opening hours, the light is good, and the visitor numbers are low compared to summer.
This is the specific post-marathon advantage over the sites in central Rome: the Palatine Hill, the Roman Forum, and the Baths of Caracalla all involve uneven basalt paving, unexpected steps, and gradients that are not negotiated comfortably with legs that ran 26.2 miles the day before. Ostia Antica was an ancient Roman city built at sea level on a river flood plain. It is, structurally, flat.
The Site
Ostia was Rome's port city from approximately the 4th century BC until silting of the Tiber left it stranded inland in the 4th century AD. At its peak under Trajan and Hadrian it had a population of perhaps 50,000. The preservation is extraordinary.
The Decumanus Maximus - the main east-west street - runs dead straight for over a kilometre from the entrance gate to the forum, surfaced in the same large basalt blocks as in antiquity, worn smooth by two thousand years of traffic and now entirely level. Walking it slowly, stopping at the intact shopfronts, the thermopolia (Roman fast-food counters with built-in storage jars), and the tavern mosaics gives a sense of urban scale that the isolated monuments of central Rome cannot quite provide.
The Teatro di Ostia, built under Agrippa in the late 1st century BC, is a semicircular theatre capable of holding 3,000 spectators, with the marble seating banks partially reconstructed. The orchestra floor is level.
The Piazzale delle Corporazioni - the square behind the theatre where the trade guilds of Rome's Mediterranean trading partners maintained offices, each decorated with a mosaic advertising their commodity (an elephant for African ivory traders, a lighthouse for the Alexandrian grain fleet) - is one of the more unexpectedly affecting moments in the entire Roman archaeological world.
The Baths of Neptune (early 2nd century) contain a floor mosaic depicting the sea god driving a chariot drawn by sea-horses, covering approximately 300 square metres. It is entirely at ground level.
March at Ostia Antica: The site opens at 09:00. Entry is approximately €12. In March you may spend an hour on the main street without seeing another tourist. This is genuinely possible.
Getting Back
Roma-Lido trains back to Porta San Paolo (Piramide) run every 15 minutes. From Piramide, Line B metro reaches Termini in 5 minutes.